Oil spills being cleaned up

Nearly one-third of the 160,000 barrels of oil that spilled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has been recovered, and much of the rest has either evaporated or been dispersed naturally, state and federal authorities said Friday.

Capt. Frank Paskewich, who is helping coordinate oil-spill recovery efforts for the U.S. Coast Guard, said contractors have recovered about 50,000 barrels of oil, or 2.1 million gallons, from six major spills along the Mississippi River caused by Katrina. All of the spills occurred below New Orleans, most of them at tank storage facilities in lower Plaquemines Parish.

The only spill that occurred near a metropolitan area was a 20,000-barrel spill at the Murphy Oil Chalmette (Katrina photos: The early days in St. Bernard) Refining, parts of which escaped a protective berm around the refinery and seeped into the surrounding neighborhood. The biggest of the spills occurred at tank farms operated by Bass Enterprises on the east bank of the river near Port Sulphur.

Although oil was reported to be several feet thick in some areas of Chalmette near the refinery, Paskewich said clean-up crews are well on their way to containing the spill. "We have some of the most experienced pollution recovery experts in the world on this case, " he said.

Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator Roland Guidry said recovery efforts have picked up considerably since the immediate aftermath of the storm, when communications was poor to nonexistent and clean-up crews had trouble accessing the spills. "We had to just beg, borrow and steel to get to where we were going, " in the beginning, Guidry said.